Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [0]
Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water
Elizabeth Royte
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Chapter 1: An Alarm in the Woods
Chapter 2: All You Can Drink
Chapter 3: Mysteries of the Deep
Chapter 4: The Cradle of the Saco
Chapter 5: The Public Trough
Chapter 6: Aftertaste
Chapter 7: Backlash
Chapter 8: Town Meeting
Chapter 9: Something to Drink?
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Selected Bibliography and Further Reading
By The Same Author
Imprint
Praise for Bottlemania
“Fantastic.”
—NewYork Times
“Entertaining and eye-opening.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Royte’s lively investigation of water politics will leave you ashamed to drink out of plastic, uneasy about the tap, and impressed by her ability to synthesize complicated material into such a witty and engaging book.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Seamlessly blend[s] scientific explanation and social observation.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“An intrepid, intelligent analysis of Americans’ raging thirst for bottled water.”
—BookPage
“A sharp indictment of the bottled-water industry.”
—New York Observer
“Compelling and dynamic.”
—Library Journal
“At a time of climate change and increasing risks to global water supplies, we must change the way we think about this crucial resource and begin treating it as a public good to be preserved, rather than the equivalent of an oil deposit or timber forest, ripe for corporate exploitation.”
—New Scientist
“An intriguing look at a totem of the ultramodern, perhaps selfish, way we live now.”
—Time Out Chicago
“An essential, if somewhat disturbing, read.”
—Very Short List
“A breezy, accessible history of water through the ages.”
—New York Post
“Royte deserves credit for her tenacity and well-balanced approach . . . Lively investigative journalism.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Chapter 1
AN ALARM IN THE WOODS
ON A BALMY fall afternoon, with the maples at their flaming peak and the white ashes shading to yellow, Tom Brennan, natural resources manager for Nestlé Waters North America, drives down a gravel road in western Maine. He parks his truck in front of a small stone cottage topped by a pitched green roof. The building wouldn’t look out of place in the Adirondacks. But its green wooden door opens not to reveal a rag rug and a woodstove but yet another door—a serious-looking door made of thick steel that can be breached only with the right combination of keys, codes, and security cards. Behind it are cameras and a motion detector. Are they guarding a gold reserve or an arsenal? No, they superintend an assemblage of stainless steel pipes, gauges, levers, and a device called a pig, about the size and shape of a boat bumper, that’s periodically forced through the pipes with water pressure to clean and disinfect. The linoleum floor is spotless.
“Any sort of intrusion into the pump house,” Brennan says, “and the water automatically shuts off.” The pump house aggregates water from five boreholes, or wells, located not far away at the bottom of a gentle valley, and sends it shooting through an underground pipe and, a mile to the north, into the largest water-bottling plant in the country. When the water comes back out, it’s in plastic containers labeled Poland Spring.
I take a good look around, not really appreciating the engineering that goes into such a place, and then we turn to leave. I am eager to see the water, the place where it springs from the earth. Brennan fumbles with a security card and keys, then we continue downhill through a young forest. Turning a bend, we come upon a man in casual clothes walking rapidly, a roll of duct tape in his hand. His black Lab darts into the trees, then back out and in again. When he hears the truck, the hiker glances furtively over his shoulder, then slips into the roadside bracken.
“He sure disappeared quick,” Brennan says, without emotion. Though the fifteen-hundred-acre property is private, Nestlé, a Swiss-owned conglomerate and the largest food-processing company in the world, isn’t strict about trespassing. The